Category Archives: Theology

Worship-is-us, yeah?

Posted on 23/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

Someone at church suggested a new song for Sunday services, and being in the band I went to YouTube to look up how it goes. The clip was of the writer singing his own song. He was a young man with a strange haircut, tattoos and an expensive Gibson J45 guitar. He stood on stage amid well orchestrated lights, accompanied by a band of equally young chaps and young blonde ladies, all looking worshipful if they weren’t actually playing instruments, in which case they just looked like musicians. Somewhere, I suppose, there was a congregation. “It’s all about you, Jesus…”

Posted in Music, Theology | 7 Comments

Would you Adam and Eve it?

Posted on 19/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

For Christians (and Jews and others) seeking to maintain the historicity of a first human couple, Adam and Eve, there are really three broad ways to proceed. My aim here is to cast doubt on one of them, from a biblical standpoint, and so I’ll break the usual pattern of such discussions by stating my own position first, and then leaving it to one side!

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

The heavens declare the crisis in mental health…

Posted on 18/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

Before the age of atheism, the natural human response to the beauties of nature was to see in them the power and wisdom of God, just as Romans 1:20 reminds us. The perennial danger was to worship the creature, rather than the Creator. But the pagan hunter feeling the wind on his skin as he looked across the veldt, the Saxon poet weaving birds and beasts into his measures, Francis Bacon attesting that the closer one studies nature the more God’s hand is perceived, or the peasant woman toiling to collect water from the stream, and pausing at the bejewelled kingfisher passing by… the common heritage of all these was … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

God’s purposes in creation – inscrutable or logical?

Posted on 16/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just bought the new book God’s Grandeur – The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. It’s edited by Ann Gauger, whom I befriended over at Peaceful Science a few years ago, before she was hounded off by the constant sneering of the resident militant anti-theists there. Having brought back to mind my longstanding interest in biological origins, I thought before getting into it to do a blog on the surprisingly uncertain support for Darwinian evolution in the fossil record. Indeed, the more I’ve looked at the evidence over the last decade, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that the evidence itself, freed from materialist metaphysical preferences, points more to … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

The Sabbath was made for man

Posted on 07/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

One of the insights I gained when writing The Generations of Heaven and Earth was what theologian Claus Westermann wrote about the command given to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. He suggested that it was only the command that made relationship possible between man and God, thus enabling true human freedom. As I summarised it in my book: “The freedom of this relationship arises only from the command; without the command there would be no freedom.” Now this is a particularly bold statement in that Westermann has just quoted Gerhard von Rad’s words about the preceding permission to eat from any tree of the garden: “God begins … Continue reading →

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A personal valediction

Posted on 05/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’m of that age when my friends and heroes alike begin to be seriously thinned out by death. The most recent hero was Ray Shulman, writer and multi-instrumentalist in the band Gentle Giant, once described as “the greatest bass player you’ve never heard of.” He died a week or two ago. Then last month I came across an obituary about my closest childhood friend, who started school the same day as me, then followed me in a move to another school, as well as being in the same Wolf Cub pack. Eventually we were only separated by the eleven-plus exam, and he went on to become a sub-editor on a … Continue reading →

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The danger of (post)modern syncretism

Posted on 28/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

The Puritans are (and always were) misunderstood as believing that they were morally or spiritually purer than their fellows. But in fact their basic tenet was rather that there is such a thing as “pure religion,” in the sense of the original gospel of Christ and the apostles untrammeled by syncretistic additions from other religions. This, of course, was the basis for the Protestant Reformation. It is (as the first of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg theses stressed) a religion of repeated repentance leading to constant assurance of salvation.

Posted in Creation, History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Why some lies take over the world

Posted on 21/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’ve written before about the case of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer and his tragic fate at the hands of Dr John Money and Johns Hopkins University, on this blog in 2015 and 2019, and in my e-book Seeing Through Smoke. I’m reminded of it again by a video about it hosted by Jordan Peterson (himself a psychologist, of course). I think there’s a good case to be made that this cruel fraud, perpetrated upon an unfortunate boy and his whole family with devastating results, is the principle source of the whole societally destructive transgender issue today. Therefore you definitely need to know about it, and I’d like today to try and explore … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

The astonishing Genesis 1-11

Posted on 28/03/2023 by Jon Garvey

The word from my pastor is that our church will be basing its Sunday teaching for the next few months on Genesis 1-11 – the “Protohistory” (in Gordon Wenham’s usage) or, to quote another OT scholar, “the Old Testament of the Old Testament.”

Posted in Creation, History, Theology | 6 Comments

Too far gone to reform

Posted on 23/03/2023 by Jon Garvey

A segment by Tucker Carlson notes how few of the American public, relatively speaking, see the significance of recent news events like the Chinese-mediated rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, not to mention the alliance now formed between China and Russia. As Tucker points out, we are actually witnessing the end of American (for which, in practice, read “Western”) hegemony in the world. He’s not wrong about the complacency, yet I remain surprised. It seems to me that the very blindness of governments and people alike to this, which resembles Belshazzar’s partying complacency on the eve of defeat by the Medes in Daniel, or indeed Jesus’s analogy between his own … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments